Archive for August, 2015

I’ve been trying to get back to this blog, but without much luck. Things (Street Song) keep getting in the way. But as a gesture of my sincerity, I am going to do a short one. I have an idea for a longer post, which I hope to write soon.

When I was in high school, my social studies class received two visitors from England who were on a world tour. The school had invited them to speak to us, but they bored me, so I tuned them out. I was gazing out the classroom window when I heard one of them saw something that caught my attention. “Now, I’m sure everyone in this room will agree with me when I say that Winston Churchill was the greatest man of the 20th Century.” What a preposterous thing to say! I thought. First of all, nobody in that room thought about things like that at all. And I certainly did not agree. To me, Churchill was just some fat man who sat on his ass smoking cigars while sending young men off to die in wars (an opinion that has not changed in nearly 50 years). But my disdain for the man forced me to think about who I would give the title “Greatest Man of the 20th Century.” At the time, I came up with Martin Luther King. But now I would say Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the Japanese Zen master who founded the Zen Center here in San Francisco.

David Chadwick, a former student of Suzuki, has a web site devoted to the man and frequently posts quotes from the Suzuki. Here’s a recent posting that I like very much.

Truth is not some particular, you know, thing. If I say truth you think it is some special theory [laughs] or mathematical or scientific theory. But we don’t mean such concrete, static logic by truth. Truth is unconditionality or eternal reality. Reality does not take any form.